Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (33 page)

“I’ll be at the concert,” Renata said. “I don’t know who I’ll be with.”

“You never do,” Quinn said.

George and Vivian were walking on North Pearl, taking the long way to the DeWitt Clinton Hotel and Cody’s concert. They were under the Kenmore Hotel’s marquee and George stopped and looked in through the glass door toward the old lobby. It was a mess. A welfare hotel now.

“My father lived here,” he said. “He was friends with the rich colored man who owned it. His name, what’s his name? My father thought the world of him, I think he wrote about him. What was his name, Eb, Ebble, there was a slave in there somewhere. Blee, Blay. He built the hotel, high class.”

A flung rock smashed the storefront window of what used to be the Kenmore bar, and flying glass cut George’s head. He and Vivian turned to see six young negroes across the street, all with rocks in their hands.

“Hey you,” George yelled, “what the hell are you throwing rocks for?” One of them threw another rock and broke the window of the Federal Bakery and the six then moved up Pearl Street. Vivian saw George’s head was bleeding and she took his pocket handkerchief and blotted the cut. She walked him four steps to a parked car so he could lean against it and she gave him the handkerchief to press on the wound to stanch the blood. She picked up his hat from the sidewalk and saw George staring again into the old Kenmore lobby.

“Adam Blake owned this hotel,” he said, “and his father was Adam before him, a slave born in 1770 who died at ninety-four up on Third Street in Arbor Hill, and my father wrote about him because the old man, the old Adam, was king of the Pinksters, the big holiday when the slaves sang and danced all week on State Street hill. When my father went to Cuba he saw somebody dancing just like Adam danced in the Pinksterfest, only he was in the jungle. Young Adam was a prince of a fella, everybody loved him, you couldn’t ask for better, he had money and style and he made the Kenmore the best hotel in Albany.”

George seemed to have sudden and total recall of those old times, with more control of specifics than Vivian had heard from him all day. A siren wailed, coming this way, and they saw the six young negroes running toward Clinton Avenue, breaking windows in a liquor store and the Grand Cash meat market as they went.

“This is like Petey Hawkins,” George said. “His barber shop was right around the next corner, on Sheridan, and he gave me many a haircut, because he was my only colored customer when I cut hair myself. I was in his place the week of the Jeffries-Johnson fight and I told Petey I’d take Jeffries and he says, George, don’t bet against Jack, he can’t lose, he wants it too much, his daddy was a slave and he wants to be as big as President Arthur, he tells his mama that. Jack’s been to Albany and I shaved him when he wasn’t the champion and he’s gonna come here again and I’m gonna shave him as the world champion. He’s gonna be a great man and he sure gonna win this fight, George, and I don’t wanna take your money. I got ten bucks says it’s Jeffries, I said. Georgie, Georgie, tell you what, don’t give me no money, and I’ll pay you ten if you win but if you lose you ride me down Pearl Street in a wheelbarrow, down to State Street and back to the barbershop, and I said, Petey, you’ll never take that ride, but you’re on.

“He was taking a ton of bets, odds were ten to seven against Jack, and Petey bet every nickel he had and was holdin’ money in his safe for dozens of other bets, most honest man in Albany and everybody knew it. Jeffries was this huge, hairy Irishman, world champ, retired undefeated in nineteen-five after twenty fights when he run out of challengers. Johnson lost two fights out of sixty-four and took the world heavyweight title from Tommy Burns in Australia with a TKO. But all this country’d give him was the colored world title. Yet he beat every white man that come along and he kept saying, I want the champ, I want Jeffries, but Jeffries wouldn’t fight him. Jack kept up the nag and then five years after he quit the ring Jeffries says, all right I’ll come back and beat your black ass, and every Irishman in Albany was for him. The fight was in Reno in front of fifteen thousand and the big-time champs were there—Corbett, Fitzsimmons, John L., Tommy Burns, all with Jeffries. But Stanley Ketchel said different. Ketchel knocked Johnson down in nineteen-nine but Johnson got up and hit him an uppercut and got two of Ketchel’s teeth in his glove. Ketchel knew the man and he said Johnson’s gonna send Big Jim out of this town with a broken heart. Petey and I went down to Beaver Street, front of the
Times Union
, to get the teletype bulletins round-by-round. They’d read ’em out loud with a megaphone and then post ’em on a big board. First three rounds Johnson’s playin’ with Jeffries and by six everybody knows Jeffries is outclassed and after eleven he’s hopeless. Petey says to me, You own a wheelbarrow, Georgie? Johnson knocked Jeffries down twice in the fifteenth and then stood over him with fists up. Back before the first round Jim Corbett was saying, He’s gonna kill you, Jack, and Jack says, That’s what they all say, but now Jeffries is down and Corbett’s yelling, Don’t, Jack, don’t hit him. Then Jeffries gets up and Jack throws a right cross and two left hooks and down he goes forever, bloody and senseless, his mother wouldn’t recognize that face. His doctor jumps in the ring and says, Stop it, don’t put the old fellow out. They sit him in the corner and Jeffries says, I was too old, I couldn’t come back. Only mark on Johnson was an old lip cut Jeffries reopened with one of the few he put in Jack’s mush. Jack beat him fair and square, no yellow streak in the man. He’s the champ. Nobody’ll beat the Big Black.

“So there we were, me pushing Petey Hawkins in a wheelbarrow down North Pearl, a few wagons on the street, not many since it’s the Fourth, and Petey’s sitting on two pillows, legs dangling over the front of the barrow, his smile as big as his straw hat. We get to State Street and I turn around and we’re almost back to the barbershop, just a few steps from where we are right now, and Dummy Quain, one of the Lousy Dozen that hung around Dunn’s Saloon, says, That ain’t right, pushin’ a nigger, and Dummy walks alongside me and says, This ain’t right, George, and I say, Forget it Dummy, I lost a bet on Jeffries and I gotta pay the man. Dummy kept walking and then he grabbed the barrow and tipped Petey onto the cobbles of Pearl Street and said, Fuck you, nigger.

“I hit Dummy and he wobbled and fell against a horse and the horse bit him, but Gerber and Hosey from the Lousy Dozen were on Petey before he could get up, kicking him. Three young coloreds in front of Petey’s barbershop—one of them was Petey’s brother, Nigger Dick—were waiting to get their winnings out of Petey’s safe and they come running. More whites poured out of Mahar’s and two more coloreds walking down Pearl jumped into it. I helped Petey stand up and I said, We got a riot, and he hit Hosey. Gerber knocked me down and Dick Hawkins grabbed Gerber’s arm with both hands and broke it. How’s your arm? I asked Gerber and Dick give me a big smile. Then Petey saw more whites coming up Columbia Street and he says, Outa here, outa here, too many of’em, and the six coloreds run up Pearl, Petey leadin’ ’em toward the Third Precinct near Wilson Street with a dozen whites on their tail. I was running right with them and I saw Dick Hawkins coming last and then one of the whites yells, Pipe that big shine, and Dick turns around just as this heavy fella was swingin’ at him with a piece of pipe, and Dick cut the man’s arm and face so fast it’s black lightning and a whole lot of blood, and the man’s in a heap as Dick comes inside the Precinct. The Lousy Dozen was now a Lousy Two Dozen, and they were rattling the door. But the cop bolted it and waved his pistol at them. Lotta scenes like that all over the country that day—twenty-four coloreds killed and a couple of whites, and they burned stores and houses in the big cities, all because there wasn’t no more white hope.”

Doc Fahey, in one of those detective cars that were coming up Pearl Street with the open siren, saw George sitting on the fender of a parked car in front of the Kenmore. Fahey and his partner, Warren Prior, put George and Vivian in their backseat and took them to Memorial Hospital up the block. Fahey called the
Times Union
to tell Quinn he’d found George, but Quinn was out, so Fahey left a message.

“How’s the head, George?” Fahey asked.

“Which head?”

“Yours. The cut. Does it hurt?”

“Not a bit,” said George.

“Did you see who threw the rock?”

“If I ever see him again I’ll give him a swift kick in the candy.”

“Don’t get in any fights, George, back away. It’s dangerous on the street tonight.”

“No Quinn ever took a backstep for anybody. Jimmy Cagney said that to—Jimmy Cagney said . . .”

“You don’t have to be as tough as Cagney, George. There’s young black gangs out tonight and a lot of anger. Somebody already threw a couple of Molotov cocktails down by Dorsey’s. You should take George someplace safe, Vivian. I’ll call his son, Dan, and he’ll come and get him.”

“We’re going to Cody Mason’s concert over at the DeWitt,” she said.

“That’s good, Vivian. Call a cab to go over. Stay off the street tonight, all right?”

When Roy arrived at the Brothers’ storefront headquarters—two steps down from the sidewalk, three doors north of the Palace Theater’s stage door, and directly across North Pearl from Memorial Hospital—the plate glass window was gone. Gordon Buford was nailing plywood over the opening but the plywood didn’t cover it, more needed. The Malcolm X poster that had been in the window for two months lay curled over a table top in the office, a bullet hole in Malcolm’s chin.

“Clarence was here when they shot out the window,” Gordon said.

Clarence Gale, sweeping up shattered glass, said, “They missed me.”

“You see who it was?”

“Three, four white guys maybe in a Buick station wagon. Couldn’t see much.”

“Whites cruisin’ is bad news,” Gordon said. “Lot of our kids out there too. Ben and I talked to some up on Ten Broeck Street, told ’em to stay cool tonight, cops are everywhere. But the kids didn’t blink. Some of ’em’ll be around the Four Spot for the dance.”

“A dance?” Roy said. “Don’t they know about the riot?”

“They just play some riot music,” Gordon said. He hoisted a second piece of plywood into place to cover the broken window space.

Ben Jones was on the phone, sitting at a battered oak desk under a large hand-lettered sign that said: BROTHERS—WE NEED RENT AND PHONE MONEY. GET SOME! The phone company had cut service: the Brothers could receive but not make calls. A smaller sign advised,
DON’T SELL YOUR SOUL FOR $5. PAY YOUR DUES
,
$5
. The new edition of the Brothers’ tabloid,
The Emancipator
, published every so often, was stacked on a table next to the desk and a large headline from an old front page was tacked to the wall above:
FIVE BROTHERS WILL TESTIFY AT BEN JONES GUN TRIAL
. At a back corner of the room was a refrigerator, a table with three chairs, a small stove, and a shelf with plates, glasses, knives, and forks. Here the Brothers fed a hot meal daily to eighteen children of parents who were in the hospital, or in jail.

“What happened today?” Roy asked Ben.

“Woman called, her son got robbed of eighty cents in front of the Palace. White woman. Four black kids, she says. She wants us to find out who they are so she can tell the police.”